Adoring Our Lord

One of my favorite spiritual mentors over the past twenty years has been Henri Nouwen. Unfortunately, I never had the privilege of knowing him in person, but his writings have provided Spiritual Direction and encouragement for my heart journey.

Dr. Nouwen writes of an opportunity he had to meet with Mother Theresa of Calcutta. He was struggling with many things at the time and decided to use this occasion to ask Mother Theresa's advice. He sat down with her and began immediately to explain all his problems and difficulties, trying to convince her of how complicated it all was.

When, after ten minutes or so of elaborate explanation, he finally became quiet, Mother Theresa looked at him and gently said, "Well, when you spend one hour a day adoring your Lord and never do anything that you know is wrong...you will be fine!"

Nouwen writes: "When she said this, I realized, suddenly, that she had punctured my big balloon of complex self-complaints and pointed me far beyond myself to the place of real healing."

So much of the time we tend to respond to questions from below with answers from below. Mother Theresa's answer was a brilliant flash of light in the darkness of such a futile approach. Nouwen had asked some questions from below, and Mother Theresa gave him an answer from above--from God's place rather than from our human place.

In our humanity we might be susceptible to a superficial search for easy answers and shallow meaning. It is important to remember that God's Spirit is ultimately the sole source of spiritual guidance, comfort and knowing.

Sometimes, in living the questions, answers are found. More often, as our questions and issues are tested and matured in context of our practicing the disciplines of solitude and worshipful adoration of our Lord, the questions simply dissolve.

In our spiritual journeying, let us move forward with a continual openness to the disclosure of the transcendent mystery of God, before whom all questions cease. When we "adore our Lord and never do anything we know is wrong," we will be fine!

Seeing Into The Realm Of The Real

Unless we call our attention to what passes beyond what is right before our eyes, we simply won't see it. Sometimes seeing in the realm of the real requires letting go of the ever-present, dominating tyrrany of the tangible. Annie Dillard writes of seeing reality by letting go as becoming "transfixed and emptied"--seeing as "an unscrupulous observer."

Spiritual masters have repeatedly spoken of the mind's polluted river--a seemingly ceaseless flow of trivia and trash that we desperately try to dam-up, but to no avail. We must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness, acknowledging its presence without particular interest while we raise our sights and gaze beyond it to the realm of the real, the pure, the silent, the beautiful! "Launch into the deep," says Jacques Ellul, "and you shall see."

The secret of seeing is the pearl of great price.

Think for a moment on Jesus' famous words that "they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not...But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear" (Matthew 13:13, 16, KJV). How frequently I fall into the trap of looking only with the eyes, listening only with the ears, and fail to look and to listen with the heart. My seeing is too often limited, fragmented, and partial.

I pray to learn to see God's reality ever more truly, ever more fully. May I--may we--SEE, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, that "The world is charged with the grandeur of God."

Duff Gorle